Gambling Boom Turns Into Bust For Student-athletes

Ncaa Prohibitions Fail To Curb Pressures On College Campuses

November 08, 1996|By Andrew Bagnato, Tribune College Football Writer. Tribune news services contributed to this report.

Each day, college football players watch as other students fill out fraternity betting pool sheets.

On their way to practice in the afternoon, players are likely to see a billboard advertising a riverboat casino. Their radios remind them that they are one ticket away from a huge lottery jackpot. Their sports sections tell them who's favored that week.

If they stay up late enough, they can watch cable TV shows hawking this week's hot picks for bettors.

Everywhere they turn, it seems, is sports gambling.

Sports betting is big business in this country, with billions of dollars wagered each year. But as Boston College learned this week--and Northwestern learned two years ago--betting can be big trouble.

Here's another contradiction: Many athletic directors this week are citing Boston College as an example of the perils of gambling. But the National Association of Collegiate Directors of Athletics is holding its annual convention next June--in Las Vegas.

The issue of athletes who gamble exploded this week when 13 Boston College players were suspended for placing bets on college and professional sporting events.

Two of those players bet against their own team in an Oct. 26 game against Syracuse that BC lost, but prosecutors said there is no evidence those players influenced the outcome of the game.

The NCAA's major revenue-producing sports are at the heart of the contradiction.

On one hand, the NCAA men's basketball tournament and Division I-A football generate massive fan interest and revenue for the participants.

On the other hand, the games provide a hook for sports-crazed gamblers.

Sometimes, that hook snags a student-athlete. NCAA rules prohibit any wagering on athletic events by student-athletes, but those proscriptions, like many in the NCAA manual, are virtually ignored.

No credible sources believe that Boston College, Northwestern and Maryland, which last season suspended quarterback Scott Milanovich and four other athletes for betting on college games, are the only campuses on which athletes gamble.

No one has documented how much money is wagered on college sports, but the Council on Compulsive Gambling of New Jersey estimates that Americans illegally wager more than $80 billion on sports every year.

On many college campuses, wagers take the form of $5 bets on football pool sheets. But sometimes the amounts grow. At Boston College, prosecutors say football players bet from $25 to $1,000 on college and professional football and on major-league baseball.

On Tuesday, HBO will air a documentary revealing that campus bookies at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa gross $500,000 a year. Ross Greenburg, HBO Sports executive director, said students there denied that athletes gambled, but he added, "They were laughing when we asked that."

This week's BC scandal has drawn even more attention because the school still bears the scars of a basketball point-shaving scandal in the late 1970s. It is showing experience isn't always the best teacher.

"Gambling is a central concern of intercollegiate athletics," said NCAA Executive Director Cedric Dempsey, who called gambling "a cancer growing in our society."

Coincidentally, as BC announced its suspensions Wednesday, a former NCAA investigator charged with monitoring gambling and agents was meeting with the FBI in Washington. The subject of Bill Saum's meeting with the feds: illegal sports betting.

Perhaps it takes the embarrassment of a public revelation to understand. The BC scandal revived painful memories at Northwestern, which was still a year away from its Cinderella season when its gambling incident broke in late 1994.

Two years ago this month, football coach Gary Barnett sat in his office at the Nicolet Football Center and listened as Dennis Lundy, then the leading rusher in school history, admitted that he had gambled on sporting events.

There had been rumors about Lundy's fumble on the Iowa goal line in a 49-13 loss at Iowa City in 1994, but Lundy denied he had bet on Northwestern games.